August 12, 2022

From Gerald R. Lucas

Short Week Down

Classes started on Wednesday, and I have been extra-busy since. I met two classes face-to-face, and it seems my 1101 section has grown by almost ten students since. I predict Monday will be fun. I think Wednesday went well, but I predict meany problems with first journal entries come next week. Yes, I went over everything in class and I posted detailed instructions about setting the journal up, but I just have a sneaking suspicion that many of them will be writing more. I hope I’m wrong. They’re reading and writing about Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” this weekend.

I’ve been working on adding all of my teaching materials to my reMarkable. On Wednesday, I made PDF versions of my class rolls and put them on the RM2. It worked like a charm. I also found some seating chart templates that will come in handy. I hope to travel light this semester, using pretty much just the RM2 and scanned portions of the texts I teach. I already have all of the essays for my 1101 class ready-to-go. I even set up the scanner at home to make solid PDFs for the RM2.[1] I also love that I can use my old hand-written notes, and they look great. I’m such a nerd.

Shining Girls.jpg

I finished watching Shining Girls last night, and it had a very satisfying ending. The performances were first-rate, even if the premise was a bit shaky. That said, I would call it speculative fiction as it deals with time travel, expanded perception, and multiple realities. The show’s major theme is the life-changing aspects of trauma and violence toward women—how it’s maintained and propagated throughout history, keeping women from excelling to their full potentials. Man, Jamie Bell was a great villain—creepy from the get-go. Seeing what happens to him in the final episode was a joy. It’s a dark watch, but worth it.



note

  1. I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500, and it’s a great document scanner. However, the software was obviously designed my engineers, so the interface is complicated, bulky, and unintuitive, especially on Windoze (I installed it on my Win11 VM, and it syncs all scans via SyncThing to my Mac. Yes, they have a Mac version of the software, but as I mentioned, it’s big and cumbersome, and I don’t want it on my Mac.). Their web site’s software downloads is just silly: which piece of software do I need? Maybe you guys could make it clear? Hire some technical writers? And why do I need an account? C’mon.